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Special Editor's Introduction | Editor's Corner We of Film & History have been busy since the last issue of thejournal and here are some of the highlights of the past few months The Editor's Reflections and Reports Peter C. Rollins Our Conference on the West(s) November 7-9, 2002 As volume 32.2 of the Film & History goes to the printer, we have locked in our program for November 7-9, 2002 in Kansas City, Missouri at the Countryclub Plaza Marriott Hotel. We are delighted by the registration of over three hundred professors and graduate students and we anticipate strong attendance by students and faculty from local colleges and universities. The concept of "The West(s) in Film, Television, and History" suggested itself for a number of reasons. First, some of the most interesting recent work in the field of American history has reconceptualized the Westering experience ofAmericans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of us remember being exposed to "theTurner thesis" in history classes in high school; in Brookline (Massachusetts) Public High School, we used an Amherst Pamphlet Series publication on the subject, a severe, black paperback with two narrow columns oftext on each page. During my graduate student years at Harvard U, Henry Nash Smith's The Virgin Land was one of the primers for American Studies devotees. (My classmates and I even met Dr. Smith during one ofhis rare visits to the East Coast.) My move to Oklahoma in 1972 brought back Turner in full strength since our school, Oklahoma State University, was created not long after the land run and just two years prior to Turner's famous talk of 1893. We were called "Cowboys" in Stillwater while the University of Oklahoma folks were called "Sooners" in connection with the legendary tales of settlers who violated rules ofthe landrun and staked out a Kansas City monument. One of Kansas City's many beautiful parks. their claims days and hours "sooner" than it was legal to do so. In any case, the experience ofpioneers was a major subject of study for our history department. Indeed, the legacy was all around us in the names of stores and services. Most immediately, the publisher of the journal you are holding is "Frontier Printers," living proof ofthe pervasiveness ofthe frontier influence in local memory. With the advent of books like Hollywood's Indian (UP of Kentucky, Eds. Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor, Rev ed. 2002), the "new history" of the West in relation to motion pictures has flowered. Stimulated by new interpretations of Western history, insights into Hollywood's presentations have burgeoned. After our Y2000 meeting on "The American Presidency in Film and Television," it seemed obvious that we should step back and examine one of the fundamental American genre—one which Americans and their neighbors across the globe have come to define as truly American. One example ofthe pervasiveness ofthe imagery is enough: during the debates over U.S. (or U.N), intervention in Iraq, young people on the streets of Berlin were interviewed by reporters from the Cable News Network (CNN). One ridiculed the American initiative, stating that "George Bush is like a cowboy. ...a saloon owner....who is a gunslinger." Anyone familiar with the iconography of Western film would recognize that the young Berliner was summoning up a confused patchwork. For our sake, the importance is not in the imprecision of the images so much as the desire to sum up American character through the Western. (During the Cruise missile deployment debate of 1983, similar images were invoked to denigrate 6 I Film & History Rollins I Regular Feature the character and policies of President Ronald Reagan.) Alas, the young German missed a major irony ofhis imagery: for some of us, the cowboy is a positive mythic figure, not a symbol of lawlessness and shame. Furthermore, many Americans see Western films as explorations of fundamental life issues in which moral people triumph over evil—not necessarily a bad lesson in any era. Kansas City, Missouri was thejumping offpoint for three major trails to the West: the Oregon Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, and the California trail. Each trail saw families and wagons...

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